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It didn't take long in captivity before the Burnhams changed their minds. "If we can trust the Lord for a million dollar [ransom], which is something totally beyond our reach, we can trust the Lord that the million dollars never buys a weapon or blows anybody up," Martin told his wife.

Ransoms may be scandalous and costly, she says, but they're hardly immoral. "Ransoms: that's what Jesus did, right?" she asked CT. "Jesus paid a ransom for us, and it cost him everything."

Officially, the government and missions community strongly disagree with Burnham on the usefulness and effect of ransom payments. But in boardrooms and government offices both during and since her captivity, there have been quiet debates—and subtle policy shifts—on the issue. After all, the world is a very different place from what it was on May 27, 2001, when three gunmen disrupted the Burnhams' anniversary getaway by bursting into their room at the Dos Palmas Resort.

In February 2002, after a long battle between the Pentagon and the State Department, the U.S. government quietly changed its policy on overseas kidnappings. Under a new National Security Council-led committee called the Hostage Subgroup, the federal government will review each case in which an American is kidnapped overseas. "What the new policy ensures is that the government will no longer ignore cases simply because a private citizen is involved, or because the kidnapping seems to be motivated primarily by money rather than political goals," an unnamed official told The New York Times.

In what an official called a "subtle but very important" shift, the government also changed its policy on ransom payments. It still promises "no deals, no concessions," but it dropped a blanket policy barring private companies and individuals from paying ransom. American companies and families have paid numerous ransoms over the years, but now the government will merely discourage such actions rather than censure them. Now the government will continue to cooperate with families and companies, even if they choose to meet kidnappers' demands.

As University of Missouri historian Russell D. Buhite recorded in Lives at Risk (Scholarly Resources, 1995), it's not as if American foreign policy has always been guided by a rigid "no ransom/no negotiation" policy. In 1901, 11 days before Theodore Roosevelt became President, American missionary Ellen Stone was taken hostage in Turkey. Her kidnappers, Macedonians who sought an independent state, demanded 25,000 Turkish pounds (about $1 million today). Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Teresa Carpenter calls it "America's first modern hostage crisis" in her book The Miss Stone Affair, published this month by Simon & Schuster.

Rather unlike the Burnhams' situation, however, Stone had a mission board that was amenable to paying the ransom and a President who was willing to help with it. In fact, Roosevelt told the agency that Congress would reimburse any privately raised funds. Such eagerness was largely based on Stone's sex. "If a man goes out as a missionary he has no business to venture to wild lands with the expectation that somehow the government will protect him as well as if he had stayed at home," Roosevelt wrote. "If he is fit for his work, he has no more right to complain of what may befall him than a soldier has in getting shot. But it is impossible to adopt this standard for women."

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June 2003, Vol. 47, No. 6